Nicole Systrom

Nicole Systrom is Chief Impact Officer of Galvanize Climate Solutions, the mission-driven investment platform created to provide the capital, expertise and partnerships necessary to produce and scale vital and urgent climate solutions. At Galvanize, which she joined in January 2022, Nicole oversees impact management and measurement, leads the platform’s science and technology team, advises on policy and regulatory affairs, and helps identify promising climate innovations for investment.  
 
With an extensive background in environmental science and a passion for helping entrepreneurs scale breakthrough technologies, Nicole is a valued advisor to founders and funders in clean energy. Nicole is also founder of Sutro Energy Group, a consultancy that partners with philanthropists, investors and entrepreneurs to accelerate high-impact climate and clean technology solutions and work that has helped channel millions of dollars to the development of technology solutions in recent years.  
 
Nicole’s passion for motivating investors and philanthropists to support clean energy technologies means she is frequently tapped by nonprofits, foundations and family offices for her counsel on their climate-positive programs. As a board member and consultant to Prime Coalition, she helps philanthropists catalyze growth in technology startups that mitigate climate change. As an early advisor to Cyclotron Road, Nicole helped develop program and business strategies, positioning it to effectively support hard-science innovations and entrepreneurs. Today she is on the board of Activate.org, its successor organization. Nicole is also a member the President’s Council at Ceres, a nonprofit focused on sustainability challenges. 
 
A published thought leader on climate-positive innovation, Nicole has written about identifying gaps in the clean tech ecosystem, building philanthropic tools for investing in climate solutions and enabling better state energy policy. To build awareness of the climate-change crisis, Nicole helped launch the investor education series “Investing in a New Climate” with the Stanford Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance in 2015. 
 
Earlier in her career Nicole worked at TerraPass, a venture-backed startup, where she managed a project portfolio that reduced 250,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions across the U.S. Before that she was a fundraiser at the nonprofit Pacific Forest Trust, where she supported the development of methods to quantify the carbon stored in working forests.